'The Crimson Rivers': The Water's Red, and It's Not Kool-Aid

By STEPHEN HOLDEN

Published: June 29, 2001

Loud, flashy and steeped in gore, Mathieu Kassovitz's action-thriller "The Crimson Rivers" isn't kidding when it describes itself as a fusion of "Seven" and "The Silence of the Lambs." With an assaultive soundtrack that amplifies ordinary clocks into loudly ticking time bombs, restless camerawork and narrative false alarms, this French film seems American in all but language.

Halfway through, a hot-headed young policeman crashing into the lair of some Gallic skinheads takes on two of them in a kickboxing frenzy accompanied by a computer voice intoning words like "excellent" and "game over." This gratuitous sequence, thrown in to give the movie an extra jolt of adrenaline, seems so absurdly out place that it wouldn't be surprising if the combatants suddenly turned into Jackie Chan-style aerialists. It undermines any pretensions of seriousness "The Crimson Rivers" might have had, and from here on the film remains permanently off balance.

The story, adapted from a novel by Jean-Christophe Grangé, is set mainly in Guernon, a snooty university town high in the French Alps where the views are among the most giddily spectacular glimpsed in any recent film. In the most magical scene, a police investigator and a glaciologist who claims to know how to avert or trigger an avalanche descend into a crag to explore a shimmering, shadowy underworld of icy caverns and treacherous rivers.

The elevated setting underlines a fable, reminiscent of "The Silence of the Lambs," about what might be called the mind-body disconnect and how warped genius can shed its humanity in pursuit of an abstract perfection. "The Crimson Rivers" holds the conventional movie view of such matters that the loftier the scheme, the more fiendish the cruelty to justify it; for every ethereal action, there's an equal and opposite savage reaction, you might say.

This time, unfortunately, the full explanation for the movie's graphically depicted horrors is preposterous even by the almost-anything- goes standards of the action-thriller conspiracy genre. It doesn't help that these explanations tumble out all at once like a big lumpy hairball from the mouth of the Parisian investigator in charge of the murder case propelling the story. Until then, the movie has been too busy being viscerally creepy to set up its clues in any organized way.

"The Crimson Rivers" is seriously gruesome from its opening scene, in which the camera pans slowly over the corpse of the university's 32- year-old librarian, a doctoral candidate whose mutilated body was discovered high in the mountains overlooking the institution. His hands have been cut off and cauterized into stumps and his eyes have been removed. The coroner overseeing the case surmises that the victim, before succumbing, endured five hours of torture devised to produce maximum pain.

The screenplay follows the parallel investigations of two crimes. The case of the murdered librarian is overseen by Pierre Niémans (Jean Reno), a legendary Parisian investigator with an odd fear of dogs that the movie exploits for no particular purpose. Meanwhile, in another town, an aggressive local police officer, Max Kerkerian (Vincent Cassel), investigating the desecration of the tomb of a young girl who was hit by a truck two decades earlier, finds his path crossing with Niémans's, and the two crimes come together.

Niémans's most significant helper, Fanny Ferreira (Nadia Farès), is a glum, sarcastic glaciologist who eventually becomes a suspect. Like everyone else connected with the university, where the average student I.Q. is reported to be stratospheric, Fanny is a humorless, arrogant misanthrope.

The movie even toys with the supernatural. One path of the investigation leads to a convent where the dead girl's mother (Dominique Sanda) has taken the so-called vow of shadows, meaning she can henceforth be heard but never seen. As she ominously mutters about demons, the film can't resist casting a beam of light on her face to reveal her weirdly milky eyes. But that's just the kind of movie "The Crimson Rivers" is. In its quest for distraction, it's more than happy to compromise its own best intentions at every step of the way.

"The Crimson Rivers" is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). It includes quite a few extremely grisly images.

THE CRIMSON RIVERS

Directed by Mathieu Kassovitz; written (in French, with English subtitles) by Mr. Kassovitz and Jean-Christophe Grangé, based on the novel by Mr. Grangé; director of photography, Thierry Arbogast; edited by Maryline Monthieux; music by Bruno Coulais; production designer, Jérôme Chalou; produced by Alain Goldman; released by Tristar Pictures. Running time: 117 minutes. This film is rated R.